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The next impressive email does not require paranoia. It requires a process. Start by verifying the sender independently rather than relying solely on the biography, links and logos supplied in the approach. Move towards clarifying exactly what is being proposed before surrendering an hour to a meeting. Evaluate the complete exchange of value, including your time, expertise, intellectual capital, reputation, content, introductions, audience and community access.

A woman can spend twenty years building expertise inside an institution whose priorities shift in twenty weeks. Much of what she has accumulated, reputation, relationships, credibility, influence does not automatically travel with her when that institution changes course. The title, the email database, the platform, the programme. These belong to the employer, not to her. The same risk applies to founders and consultants who are, in effect, concentrated in a single client, fu

AI can describe redundancy, but it has never carried the responsibility for a decision that changed somebody's livelihood. It can explain discrimination without having experienced the subtle shift in a room when a difficult subject is raised. It can summarise entrepreneurship without having faced the uncertainty of making payroll, just as it can construct a leadership case study without carrying the organisational memory of what happened after the decision was made.

Artificial intelligence is becoming remarkably good at producing things. It can research, analyse, draft, summarise and create in seconds what once took hours. But our latest EVOLVE: AI You Can Trust: Leading Responsibly Through Intelligent Transformation conversation with Sharon Gilkes Prior and Ade Shokoya raised a more interesting question. “If access to speed, information and competent-looking output becomes commonplace, what happens to the value of human expertise?”

According to the World Economic Forum, over 50 percent of workers will require significant re-skilling by 2027, with women over forty facing the steepest skills obsolescence risk due to age bias, digital exclusion and organisational restructuring. McKinsey reports that women are twice as likely as men to experience imposter syndrome during periods of technological change, while Harvard Business Review highlights that microaggressions increase with seniority, not decrease.